


Mother Knows Best

by anythingbutplatonic



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: 4x17, Angst, Beacon of Hope, Episode Related, F/M, Heartbreak, Lots of Angst, Lots of tears, Love, Missing Scene Fic, Mother/daughter bonding - Freeform, Sadness, episode reaction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 12:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6469588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe it was time to talk.</p>
<p>Episode reaction/missing scene fic for 4x17 "Beacon of Hope".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mother Knows Best

It wasn’t every day that your robot bee nemesis made a triumphant return and made a bid for the bio-stimulant microchip embedded in your spine. 

It also wasn’t every day that every single thing you thought, did, or said, or that someone did or said to you, reminded you of your ex...everything.

Since she’d walked away from the team a couple of weeks ago, she’d thought about Oliver almost near-constantly. She’d also tried to _deny_  thinking about him near-constantly about 90% of that time. 

OJ in the fridge almost empty? _Oliver_. She wore that pink sweater he’d once told her he liked on her? _Oliver_. Brushing her teeth before going to bed? _Oliver_. 

No matter how hard she had tried to make a clean cut, as swiftly as possible removing that part of her - the part that was entwined, so intricately, with _him_  - with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, the wound still bled. And with the bleeding came _pain_ , raw pain, like an exposed nerve or putting your finger to a lit candle, hovering it over an open flame. 

It _hurt_. She’d tried to be ruthless, leaving the team, quitting the apartment - but it _still hurt_. 

She _missed_  him. 

She missed his warmth at night, and his laugh. She missed his smile and his ability to cook the most _delicious_  food (she hadn’t eaten an omelette since... _that_ ; even if she had been able to make them herself, they would never have tasted the same. Not like Oliver’s did.) and his tendency to kick off the sheets during the night, leaving her bare and exposed to the cool night air. She missed watching him write in that funny little journal of his. 

She missed the way the engagement ring he had given her had felt on her finger, the shining metal and the bright, heavy diamond catching her eye each time she moved. 

It felt like...love. A future. _Happiness._ Like being with Oliver was the only thing in the world that really mattered. 

But it wasn’t like that anymore. _They_  weren’t like that anymore. 

Felicity may have missed the ring, but she knew in her heart of hearts that it just wasn’t right. She still wanted to marry Oliver but she knew that she couldn’t. And that, right there, was the big difference keeping them apart. 

Not the _not wanting to_ , but the _I can’t._. 

So, she had held off on the “mourning period” - by doing her best to avoid it all together. 

Then Oliver had been stung by one of Brie’s bees. 

Her heart had lept into her throat, cutting off her scream -  _“Oliver!”_  - and she’d been frozen in place, backed against the wall, eyes huge and fixed on Oliver as he grunted in pain and staggered, bent at the waist, gripping Laurel’s arm to keep him semi-upright. 

Her entire body had screamed at her to go to him, to help him, to make sure he was okay - but she couldn’t do that. Not any more. 

She’d given up her right to worry about him the minute she’d handed back the ring for the second and final time.

He was still protecting her - he would always protect her - but she couldn’t protect him. Not from the bees - or the heartache she had undoubtedly caused him. 

She used to be able to soothe his distress with kind words and a touch and a kiss (or several). A hand on his arm could pull him from even the worst of nightmares, calm his nerves, or help him breathe again. 

“ _I have the magic touch,”_  she would say, wiggling her fingers in imitation of a magician casting some kind of spell. That would make Oliver smile, or laugh, and she’d know that the rough part was over. 

Now, though, her “magic touch” privileges had been revoked. 

If she had lied awake at night, biting her bottom lip till it bled, fretting over who would pull Oliver from the brink when he had a bad day or series of days, who would _know_  the right things to say, the right way to comfort him, to calm him, now that she was gone....she would deny it. 

But still, denial or not, it weighed heavily on her heart and her soul. 

The photograph of her and Oliver, on her desk at Palmer Tech, was a reminder of everything that had crumbled beneath them. She didn’t get rid of it because she loved it - and him.

After all that happened, she still loved him. 

It had been taken in Thailand, Oliver scooping her into his arms and pulling her flush against his front before she could even shriek her indignation at the sudden movement, smiling just in time to catch the the click and flash of the camera, held by a German tourist who had been kind enough to take the picture for them. 

Throwing out the picture would be tantamount to admitting she hated him - which was the complete opposite of the truth. 

She sometimes caught herself staring at it, during the day, her heart beating fast and her eyes burning, throat all choked up. 

Each time, she thought, _I still love you._

_I just want you to know that I still love you._

Once Brie was apprehended (and hospitalized from her own toxic bee creations) and she and Thea had had a chance to talk, all those feelings, combined with the adrenaline wearing off and the _ache_  in her body from the exertion of the last twelve hours, made her drained and simply _exhausted;_ all the energy seemed to have gone from her body in a single instant, leaving her wanting her bed and warm pyjamas and _sleep -_ and missing Oliver.

It was a bone-deep _craving_  that she couldn’t satisfy. 

She headed for her Mom’s place on autopilot, too tired to really focus on the road underneath and ahead of her, moving with stiff movements to open the door to her Mom’s apartment and feeling her shoulders sag with grateful relief as soon as she stepped through the door. 

She started to undress as she made her way towards the guest bedroom that she’d been using for the last couple weeks, since...The Big Incident, pulling off her suit jacket and tossing it over the back of the sofa, toeing off her shoes and leaving them at the door of the bathroom. She pulled out the tie holding back her hair and smoothed it out, combing through the frizzy strands with her fingers. When she reached the bedroom, she unzipped out of her skirt and kicked it to the floor, pulling on a pair of pink sleep shorts that were crumpled at the end of the bed. She took off her glasses and put them on the small nightstand, blinking to adjust to the dim lighting in the room. 

Felicity wandered over to the closet last, intending to find a clean pyjama shirt to wear - all her others were dirty - and was half-out of her shirt, skimming over the rack of old sweats and pants that she reserved for “lazy stay-at-home-days”, when she spotted something familiar.

_Too_ familiar. 

Her hand stopped when she reached the dove-grey hoodie hanging among her pastel-coloured sweaters and old, worn tank tops, her fingers dancing over the material as her heart slammed against her ribs in a painful tattoo. 

It felt rough, like it hadn’t been washed recently. Not as soft as it would be whenever...

Felicity swallowed, her throat working as she tried to push the memories down. Memories of happier, better times, when she and Oliver were together and they could have taken on the whole world as a team - or at least, they had thought they could. 

A shiver up her spine from the cool air made goosebumps erupt over her skin, and she shirked her shirt to wrap her arms around herself, wearing only a bra and her sleep shorts. 

Without thinking, without hesitating, she grabbed the hoodie from its hanger and slipped it on, relishing its warmth and the way it enveloped her body, close and comforting, just like -

_No._

_What the hell was she_ doing _?_

She felt her skin burn like the item was made of acid; she should have yanked it off, threw it to the ground, threw it in the _trash,_ found something else in her closet that her ex-fiance _hadn’t_  worn - but she didn’t.

She pulled it round her tighter, a cocoon around her cold, tired body. If she turned her head _just so_ , pressed her nose to the collar of it, she could smell the residue of him, sweat and cologne and coffee and metal and the sun shining through the windows on a lazy Sunday morning, home-cooked breakfast and the weird plasticky smell of Kevlar.

As she pressed one overly-large sleeve to her face to breathe in the familiar smell of everything _Oliver_ , a wracking sob escaped her chest, and tears slipped from beneath her screwed-shut eyes as everything came flooding through her all at once. 

She and Oliver weren’t together anymore.

_They weren’t together_.

It hadn’t felt real until just this moment, standing in the open closet with one of his hoodies wrapped around her like a shroud, tears streaming down her face with all the force of Niagra Falls (and probably twice the volume) as sob after sob heaved itself from her throat, the kind of noisy, anguished howl you only saw heartbroken women do in movies.

Except this wasn’t a movie. It was real, and it was happening.

She knew she was probably getting unpleasant bodily fluids all over Oliver’s sweater, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to cry and never stop.

It hurt too much to do anything except give in to it, to let herself _feel._ To grieve. To mourn. To be devastated and lost and lonely and _alone_. 

At some point, she’d slid down to hunch miserably on the floor of the bedroom, her back to the door of the closet, her hands covering her face and yet more tears leaking onto her bare knees. Felicity pressed the heels of her hands to her red, swollen eyes; she wiped at her cheeks with her sleeves until they were sodden. 

She caught sight of her toenails, painted alternate colours of silver and aquamarine, and a fresh wave of tears spilled over as Felicity remembered Oliver carefully and precisely painting them for her, his grip on her ankles gentle but firm as he’d applied the alternating colours. 

Would this _pain_ , this suffering, ever go away? 

_“You don’t_ open up _to me, hon, so I have to force your feelings out of you, like...like a_ pistachio _.”_

There had been more pressing matters at the time, like _how to avoid getting stung by an army of robotic bees controlled by a crazy hacker bee lady_ , but maybe her Mom was right. 

It felt like the last thing in the world she wanted to do - talk. If she was expected to talk about Oliver, at least. 

Except...maybe it was time to talk. 

Maybe it would make her feel, not better, but...less burdened. 

“Mom?” she called out, her voice pitched and scratchy from crying, painfully sharp to her own ears. “Are you there?”

She hadn’t even noticed whether she was alone in the apartment or not. Maybe her Mom was with Captain Lance. The thought of her being out with him and she here, alone, drowning in tears (and her own misery) sliced her deep inside like a knife through flesh, organs, and bone. 

She tried again. “Mom?”

Footsteps, light on the carpet. Then her Mom came into her bedroom, wrapped in a pair of towels, her skin still damp from the shower she must have been taking when Felicity walked in. Her expression twisted when she saw her daughter curled on the floor, her hair wet with her own tears, the hoodie too large and covering her like a blanket. 

“Oh, hon,” she breathed, her lipstick-free mouth turning down in frown that made her whole face crumple in sympathy. “Oh, Felicity...”

“I think I’m ready to talk about the break-up now,” Felicity whispered. 


End file.
